It's going to be interesting how they manage the booster shots project. Variants can come to light at any time.
Work to target a vaccine on a particular feature of the variant can only commence once the variant has come to light and after sufficient time has passed to characterise the behaviour and structure of the variant.
And even once a variant has been found and characterised, it will take time to modify a vaccine to suit it, then it will take a period to synthesize the new vaccine and another period to trial the new vaccines to ensure they work. Even then, other delays occur, manufacture, approvals, roll outs. It will be necessary to do a lot of redundant parallel planning and development. It's going to cost a lot.
With all these random occurrences, dependencies and variable delays and costs, it's going to be tricky to optimise the booster shots project. They are going to go through a lot of white board space to crystalise all these plans. There is a lot hanging on the booster shots project, the work done so far will feed into it, there is little margin for error, but it will be a miracle if it all works out optimally. Project management is a hard life.
It's going to be interesting how they manage the booster shots project. Variants can come to light at any time.
Yes, and this is the reason why, of all industries, it's travel that's hardest to get back to normal.
Continued restrictions both reduce the instance of new variants, and give us a sporting chance of track & tracing outbreaks before they spread.
We don't know enough about the new variant threat to judge. But it has to be a possibility that travel restrictions will stay for years, if only to enable all other sectors to operate freely.
Not much different to anti-flu ones, in effect. The efficacy varies from year to year for similar reasons; they're always guessing, to some extent.
Cant see it being a major issue.
This is a slow mutating virus so once prevalence is low the mRNA vaccines can certainly keep up.
Most likely it'll just be a booster to the very vulnerable in line with a flu jab each year.
The rest of the people will be fine partial immune memory and T-cell response will stop them getting very sick again just as Flu.
Oxford/AZ is more of an issue as unlike the others its already know its useless against even single mutations so becomes obsolete almost immediately. mRNAs show good efficacy against the same mutations.
The other issue with it is the chance a booster simply wont work at all unless they change the vector. And if they do that then you're looking at new clinical trials each time so obviously a huge time lag. That and the 4-6 months it takes from creation to large scale production for it.
The way i see this panning out is mRNA vaccinated vulnerable might receive a booster every few years as required as part of their annual health checks.
Oxford/Johnson *if* anyone is still using them in a years time will likely see annual.
It's going to be interesting how they manage the booster shots project. Variants can come to light at any time.
Work to target a vaccine on a particular feature of the variant can only commence once the variant has come to light and after sufficient time has passed to characterise the behaviour and structure of the variant.
And even once a variant has been found and characterised, it will take time to modify a vaccine to suit it, then it will take a period to synthesize the new vaccine and another period to trial the new vaccines to ensure they work. Even then, other delays occur, manufacture, approvals, roll outs. It will be necessary to do a lot of redundant parallel planning and development. It's going to cost a lot.
With all these random occurrences, dependencies and variable delays and costs, it's going to be tricky to optimise the booster shots project. They are going to go through a lot of white board space to crystalise all these plans. There is a lot hanging on the booster shots project, the work done so far will feed into it, there is little margin for error, but it will be a miracle if it all works out optimally. Project management is a hard life.
It just going to be like the annual flu shot. Low to moderate efficacy with whole age groups showing little or no positive health effect. Like old people. The annual flu shot is considered a huge success if the efficacy gets above 40% in a particular year. Usually its closer to 20%.
The big difference is that there is a very real health benefit to younger people from the flu shot. Influenza is a real morality risk for under 55's. There are no health benefits with current and any future SARs CoV 2 vaccines for the under 55's. The SARs CoV 2 vaccines serious adverse effect morality rate is around 70x (so far) that of influenza vaccines and although mostly very old sick people are dying enough younger people die to make the under 55 risk / benefit cost very negative with the SARs CoV 2 vaccines.
So an annual high risk vaccine for a endemic infectious diseases that only kills a very narrow cohort of sick and frail people at the rate they normally die and is of little or no serious health risk to the rest of the population.
Thats a good a definition of public health policy insanity if there ever was one.
